Storage Management

Last year at BrainShare, attendees at some of the Novell Open Enterprise Server sessions were on the edge of their seats about a cool new Novell technology called Shadow Volumes. This new technology has made its way into Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 under the revised name of Dynamic Storage Technology.

The whole idea behind Dynamic Storage Technology is to help you get a better handle on the ever-expanding costs of storing unstructured data. Some industry reports put the growth rate of unstructured data storage at 20 percent or more per year. This data comprises all the mis-cellaneous unstructured stuff that your users create every day, such as word processing documents, spreadsheets, photos, videos, mp3s, presentations and text files. To give you an example of the magnitude of the problem that companies face in this regard, one of Novell's multinational customers has more than 460 Terabytes of unstructured data in their organization.

Dynamic Storage Technology addresses this problem by letting administrators create policies that dictate what data is considered active or inactive. For example, all data that has been accessed within the last 30 days might be considered active and would remain on your high-performing and highly available SAN clusters. All of the data that hasn't been accessed in 30 days, which is considered inactive, is automatically moved to a different, less expensive storage device, such as a SATA or JBOD device, or even just an older SAN. Even though the data has been physically moved, it will appear to users, and third-party applications, as if it is still in its original location. If they try to access it, they will be automatically and transparently redirected to its new location.

The key principle here is that Dynamic Storage Technology eliminates seldom-used data from taking up valuable space on your most expensive and highest-performing storage devices.

Automate storage management

Novell Storage Manager makes it easy to allocate, manage and clean up storage. This powerful identity-driven solution automates many common storage-related tasks, including quota management, directory renaming, migration, storage triage and archiving. You can use Novell Storage Manager to manage storage on Microsoft Windows, NetWare or Novell Open Enterprise Server Linux platforms, leveraging their underlying directories. You simply set your storage policies in the directory - based on users' identities and roles - and let Novell Storage Manager do the work.

With Novell Storage Manager, you help users stay productive. They get the resources they need while significantly reducing the inconvenience, and cost, associated with provisioning tasks. Using policies, you can predefine how much storage a user or group gets based on their roles within the organization. As an added benefit, Storage Manager can pre-populate a new user's home directory with the files they need to be productive on day one.

Without an effective storage-management solution, the risks could range from lost data to more serious threats like litigation or negative audit findings. Novell Storage Manager helps you minimize these risks with automated policy management, ensuring compliance with corporate and government regulations for secure data storage. Once you've set storage policies to meet regulatory guidelines, Storage Manager delivers real-time enforcement and robust reporting to demonstrate compliance. It also protects your organization against liability by enabling you to limit the type of content that can be stored on the company's storage area network. You control what users are permitted to store, and where and when they can store it.